00:00The mood here is not that. Actually, there's a lot of optimism.
00:03There are a lot of different companies that are building things and investing things.
00:06I mean, how vulnerable really is the U.S. economy right now to some sort of geopolitical shock?
00:11Well, it may not be geopolitical. It may be the companies that start to lay people off.
00:15And so I look, the most important thing in the world today is geopolitical.
00:18What happens to the free Western democratic world, which has kind of been under attack by Russia and Ukraine,
00:24by Iran and the Middle East, you know, a little bit by China who wants to, you know,
00:28divide and conquer the Western world and, you know, both militarily and economically.
00:33You know, you have all their neighbors are re-arming because of their actions, not because of anyone else.
00:37So those are the most important things.
00:39I'd add global deficits are so large, but those are like, I call it like large moving tectonic plates
00:45that may or may not affect the economy in the short run.
00:48They may be determinative in the longer run.
00:50And some of these things, when you talk about war, you know, Vietnam, you know,
00:54did it affect the economy in the very short run? No.
00:57It had a 20-year effect after that.
00:59So you've got to look at these things as they're moving plates that can take five years to have an
01:04effect,
01:05but the effects will be real.
01:06Right now, the economy is doing fine.
01:08Asset prices are high.
01:09People are assuming things go on.
01:11I mean, no one you talk to has any idea that credit spreads can gap out a lot.
01:14And they could just because of sentiment.
01:17And so, yeah, I think there's a little bit of this, a little more exuberance than I think there should
01:21be.
01:22But we've had years of it.
01:24And, you know, the one big beautiful bill adds to, you know, adds to growth this year.
01:29Bank deregulation, other deregulation adds to growth.
01:32And animal spirits.
01:35So we'll see.
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